on your kingdom's border
by ncfan
Summary: Those years on Jakku.


It's been about a month since I last saw _The Force_ _Awakens_ , so if any of the small details are off, that's why.

I own nothing.

* * *

This is the genesis of everything—the staccato _thud-thud-thud_ of their heart and the unsteady hitch of their breathing. They're bigger than Rey, big enough that she can sit in their lap without any difficulty, press her back to their chest and frown in discomfort as that arrhythmic pounding throbs against her back. The ship tilts and the viewports are flooded with dappled red-and-golden light. Rey cranes her neck to look out the viewport and gasps—wrecked ships half-submerged by sand dot the landscape, like skeletons picked clean of flesh. Their shadows blacken the ground for miles.

They clutch her hand and lead her down the ramp, into bright sunlight and hot, dry winds that clog her mouth and eyes and nose with sand. Rey coughs and sneezes and rubs furiously at her eyes while they leave her side to speak with a local man.

"Rey." They loom over her, smelling of sour sweat and copper tang. In memory, their voice is the first thing to go, becoming a thing of howling wind. Their face is second; all she remembers after a while is the eyes, swimming with fear. "Stay here and wait."

She blinks up at them in confusion. Wait? But… no, that can't be right. They're not leaving her here by herself, are they?

They turn away from her, their cloak billowing in the wind. Rey scrabbles desperately at their hand, but to no avail. Not so much as a backward glance.

"Wait… Wait… Come back." A whimper pitches high to a scream. "Come back!" She stretches her hands up to the sky. "Come back!"

The ship shrinks to a speck in the blue sky, winking out of sight.

She cries and cries and cries, but that doesn't bring them back. She throws herself down on the ground, sobbing desolately, her tears clogged with dust, and still, they are gone. Rey cries until hands lift her roughly from the ground and dunk her head unceremoniously in a well full of manky water.

"Quit your fool crying." She splutters, spitting the foul water out of her mouth and grimacing. There is the man standing over her, glaring. "You'll die of thirst out here if you cry too much. You want that?"

Rey stares at him in shock—indeed, her tears dry up completely at the idea that she could _die_ if she cries too much. The man nods with gruff approval. "Good. If you're going to die, never let it be because you just gave up. Now, if you're gonna live here, you've gotta work. You don't work, you don't eat."

But what can she do?

"You're going to go out to those ships you saw coming in. You're gonna look in them and find anything you think might make you some creds and bring it back here. It's not like you could really do anything else, little as you are. There're plenty of other scavengers out there, so watch out, kid."

They'll be back soon. They'll come to get her soon; they _have_ to. But… but she doesn't know how long, _exactly_. So in the morning, Rey trails after a line of sharp-eyed denizens who tramp down to the places where ships jut from the sand like mountains.

It's… fun, actually. Rey soon finds herself sweating profusely and her skin red and raw and burning, but exploring the cavernous ships is almost like playing hide-and-seek (Except there's no one else to play it with). She delves deep into the bellies of the metal monsters that constitute her new livelihood, searching for things that glitter, things that gleam, things that get her food at the end of the day. Sometimes, she finds dark, quiet places away from the light, places where the heat dies and the wall she presses her back against is cool as ice and dry as dust, and she can closer her eyes and just… forget. Let the shadows cradle her there.

The other scavengers let her sip from their canteens and nibble bits of tasteless ration bars, but in practically the same breath they pull, yank, tear at Rey's sack with ravenous hands, set to make off with everything she's found and pass it off as their own. She learns early: kick, scratch, bite. The biting is especially important; anyone holding her down will howl and let go immediately if she just bites down hard (It does leave a foul taste in her mouth, sour and coppery, that water won't easily rid her of). Later, when she gets her own canteen: work alone. Avoid the others. Don't let them see that you've found something valuable, or anything at all. She gets good at avoiding the others; the hairs on the back of her neck will prickle and something will tug at her mind just before they appear on the horizon.

With no home to call her own, Rey curls up by booths in the marketplace, but she's accosted there as well, by older children convinced the newcomer has things they could hock and unwilling to accept that she doesn't. They go away with scratched faces and teeth marks on their arms, but Rey gets tired of dealing with this every night, and she's sick of waking up all but buried in sand, so she goes scouting in the nearby hills for something, anything that could pass for shelter where she doesn't have to _deal_ with other people. Eventually, she finds it, an old AT-AT speckled with rust. It's not much. It's not all that comfortable, swelteringly hot in the day and somehow managing to retain none of that heat at night, when it would have been welcomed. The floor is unyielding, even after Rey finds rough, starchy blankets in old crew quarters in the ships to make a pallet for herself, but still, it's…

No, it's not home. If she calls it 'home', that means she's staying here forever and her family's never coming to get her. It's the place where she sleeps, where she's offered minimal protection from the elements and doesn't wake up covered in sand. It's where she sleeps, and dreams of water, more water than she'll ever find on Jakku, and mossy rocks jutting from the sparkling blue. She scratches the days out on the wall, mark after mark after mark, so she can count the days until her family comes back for her.

Still, it's an imitation of a home, and it's a place where Rey counts herself safe, and she can't stand keeping it bare except for blankets for very long. She occasionally finds things out during the day, things that she knows wouldn't get her anything back at the settlement or maybe would, but she just wants them anyways. A helmet. Pins and medals that gleam like sunlight themselves when polished. Sheets of plastic she cuts into crude flowers.

One day, Rey forces open the door to a medical bay and finds rolls of white gauze and spools of waxy thread left untouched by time or other hopeful scavengers. She takes them home, and makes two dolls with them, just bunches of gauze tied off at the 'neck', just a head and a skirt, not even a face. But still, they're hers.

She calls them 'Mother' and 'Father.' She plays with them outside in the hills, showing them pinkish stones or the occasional flower quivering rooted in the rocks and sand, trembling dangerously with each gust of wind, seemingly ready to blow away. They sit with her as she eats lumpy rations that taste of sand and stick to the roof of her mouth like glue. They never say a word about her table manners, and she never says a word about the hole in the pit of her stomach. At night, Rey puts them on either side of her when she lies down to sleep. Or tries to sleep, anyways. Most nights, she lies awake under her blankets, staring up at the ceiling, listening as wind batters on the roof and sand hisses at the windows. When it rains, rare rain that fills up the dry riverbanks for a day and leaves behind soft grass and white and orange flowers for a week, and whose sweet smell does not linger for even an hour, then she has no trouble sleeping at all.

The days pass, then weeks. Every ship touching down is her family come to get her, and when strangers inevitably spill off the ramp, Rey's heart sinks in disappointment. She still watches, and waits, though, and holds her breath in anticipation every time a new ship comes. Even in the face of frustration, she still cannot help but hope.

-0-0-0-

There is a poem she picks up early on from Xital and the other old women here. They teach it to her over their washing, their scrubbing of their various finds of the day, as the sun blisters Rey's neck and her dry mouth seems to crack from thirst.

 _What is waiting?  
Waiting is the wind that blows  
Over dry hill and barren rock  
Waiting is the stars that wheel  
Though they've long since died  
Waiting is the traveler that treks  
Ever on and on, always looking, never finding  
Waiting is the shadow  
That stretches further at dusk  
Disappears from you at night  
And returns in the morning  
It will never leave_

-0-0-0-

The scratch marks on the walls of the AT-AT have looped every wall more than once, the catalogue of days that have stretched to eternity. 'Mother' is gone, a gift to a younger child whose sandy lips brush roughly cross Rey's cheek in thanks. She is 'Mother' no longer, but 'Ishara,' whose head is clutched in one grubby hand and whose skirt drags little furrows in the sand. 'Father' still sits out in her shell of a house, and though faceless cannot be called anything but forlorn.

Scavenging has entirely ceased to be fun, as the pickings grow slimmer and Rey's competition fiercer. As she's grown bigger so too has the hole in the pit of her stomach, and the portions she gets just seem to get smaller all the time. She edges out of bed a little earlier each morning, in the hopes that longer days searching the ships will yield better results. Sometimes, when she's driving home late in the day, undulating dust clouds will pass over the sun, and, just for a moment, Rey sees two suns where there ought to only be one. It must be the heat getting to her, she supposes, or the general sense of apathy that pervades her at sunset, or the fact that she hasn't had water in a couple of hours is making her see double.

Sometimes, Rey takes charge of the kids being sent out to the ships nowadays, few as they are, and shows them the ropes as best she can. She knows she's only raising up the next generation of competition, knows that give it a few years and they'll be the ones trying to jump her when she's not looking and make off with her finds. But they're like she was, and she doesn't want them to be any hungrier than she is. And maybe, just maybe, they'll grow up to be kind.

And maybe she won't still be a scavenger by the time they get old enough to be serious competition to her. She could easily find work as a mechanic; there's always something breaking down, and people seem to think she's good at fixing things. And Rey could earn money on the side doing translation work for the traders who occasionally come to Jakku to buy and sell; she's certainly picked up enough languages over the years.

But… But all of that would require that she leave this place, and go elsewhere on Jakku, wherever the work took her. Rey knows she can't do that; this is where she was left, and this is where she will stay, until the promised day arrives. She dreams in green and blue, still, and it will do for now. Traveling can wait for other days, days when she does not have this obligation rooting her to the thin soil and the weathered rocks. It can wait for days when her shadow does not stretch behind her at sunset, disappear at night, and return to her in the morning. When the wind does not howl overhead, and the ghosts of dead stars don't twinkle in the night sky. (Sometimes, though, she wonders if she's not _supposed_ to travel.)

(Sometimes, in her dreams, water washes over her and she drifts, drifts, drifts away, and wakes with the salt smell still in her nostrils. A portent of the future. She will leave this place, one day.)

Every time a ship makes a landing, Rey looks up, and watches the ramp in white-knuckled anticipation. Disappointment is her second skin now, but even after years of waiting, she still finds that she cannot help but hope.


End file.
